Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday November 02, 2013 @10:32AM
from the file-formats-yet-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With Android 4.4 KitKat, Google's biggest blow to Microsoft isn't against Windows Phone. It's against Microsoft Office. You see, KitKat ships with Quickoffice, letting you edit Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on the go, without paying a dime, straight out of the box. This tidbit was largely lost in the news yesterday, given the large number of improvements and new features that KitKat offers. Yet it's a very big deal: every Android user that upgrades to KitKat will get Google's Quickoffice, and every new Android device (starting with the Nexus 5) that ships with KitKat or higher will also get Quickoffice."

quickoffice sold itself to google right after they ran out of steady stream of money coming from nokia and due to some nokians benefiting from that arrangement it took 2 years longer than was supposed to get ms versions of ms document viewers on symbians....

yeah, great, another android fuck-up if you're tablet or phone is pre-loaded with it, you can't update to a newer version unless the manufacturer releases a newer version.. therefore i'm stuck to a very old version of quickoffice on my xoom...

That's not an Android fuck-up. That's the OEM's problem, and it has nothing to do with Android. I chose Nexus devices (4 and 7) to avoid this, as these are the devices Android was written for. For any non-Nexus device, you depend on the OEM for certain things that may or may not occur. As a Slashdot person, surely you know this, right?

Yes it's an android fuckup, for letting OEM's being able to do it in the first place.. the motorolla xoom was the honeycomb developer device, so it was the 'nexus' device in that time, and that's the one that I have and is having the problem..

Yes it's an android fuckup, for letting OEM's being able to do it in the first place.. the motorolla xoom was the honeycomb developer device, so it was the 'nexus' device in that time, and that's the one that I have and is having the problem..

By your logic it would be a Google fuckup for letting OEMs have full control of what they do with Android which has no technical bearing on merits of Android in itself. BTW, big props to Google for going in the other direction of Apple by letting OEMs do this - I seem to remember this worked out pretty well for MSFT.

If you are a Open Handset Alliance, you are not allowed to fork Android. Expulsion awaits if you do so. If you are not member of Open Handset Alliance, you are not allowed to use the Android trademark and include the app store (and other things) on your phone that runs the Android fork.

See the ugly truth at http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/Open source means nothing to Google.

yeah, great, another android fuck-up if you're tablet or phone is pre-loaded with it, you can't update to a newer version unless the manufacturer releases a newer version.. therefore i'm stuck to a very old version of quickoffice on my xoom...

That's not an Android fuck-up. That's the OEM's problem, and it has nothing to do with Android. I chose Nexus devices (4 and 7) to avoid this, as these are the devices Android was written for. For any non-Nexus device, you depend on the OEM for certain things that may or may not occur. As a Slashdot person, surely you know this, right?

I agree completely, but different users have different priorities. My problem with the Nexus is the lack of choice. I'd rather Google partnered up with different companies

Your OEM probably changed the signature on the APK they pre-installed.

You can upgrade a pre-installed APK from Google Play. This is not a problem. Unless, that is, the package name for the new and old APKs is the same, but the signing certificate is not. This is not a bad thing, except when %!@#(*# OEMs re-sign APKs they pre-install.

I made a living off localizing android systems for the local market, and I always had a bit of a hard time explaining to the clients why I couldn't localize none-core apps (which include the Google Play itself, for which the Hebrew translation seems to have been done by someone quite illiterate).

You could take a minute to, you know, like, look at the Play store (unless you don't have an Android phone and are just ranting to hear yourself scream) and see that this is a free install for any recent Android device. (And you can uninstall it from any Android device also if you don't want it.)Looks like 1,000,000+ people have downloaded it.I just installed the latest version on an old HTC phone which has been heavily customized by HTC with the "Sense" interface with no problems.(I can uninstall it too...

*sigh*.. If I could uninstall it I would have, it's a common problem (just read some forums).. I have a motorolla xoom tablet.. Yes, QuickOffice is free, I know that too, but before you can install the latest version you need to be able to remove the old one, and that's not possible when QO shipped with your tablet (at least on 'older' devices)..

But this is not an Android fuck-up, as you claimed, but a Motorola fuck-up, if anything.On all 6 of my Android devices (from 4 different makers) I can update pre-installed apps without problem.

If you really would have to remove the old version on the Xoom to install a new version you should be able to do that by rooting your device. After that you can usually remove pre-installed apps as you can get write access to the system folders.

The way you worded your original statement is just plain wrong.(And don't

*sigh*.. If I could uninstall it I would have, it's a common problem (just read some forums).. I have a motorolla xoom tablet.. Yes, QuickOffice is free, I know that too, but before you can install the latest version you need to be able to remove the old one, and that's not possible when QO shipped with your tablet (at least on 'older' devices)..

Screw both MS and Google, I'm using Open Office. Opens and saves all formats just fine, exports easily to PDF and I don't have to be online to use it. It would be handy to open a Word doc or Oo doc on my phone, though, although I certainly wouldn't want to write or edit on a phone.

The way Android is structured, some apps are in a read-write filesystem and can be uninstalled, some are in 'ROM' (a read-only filesystem in the flash that is only modified when you do a firmware update) and so can't be uninstalled. As of Android 4, they can be hidden from the UI, but they're still there (and there have been instances where 'disabled' apps still had exploitable vulnerabilities).

I'd love to be able to buy an Android tablet with an absolute minimum of things in the ROM image and everythin

The way Android is structured, some apps are in a read-write filesystem and can be uninstalled, some are in 'ROM' (a read-only filesystem in the flash that is only modified when you do a firmware update)

Usually you can remove pre-installed apps once you rooted your android device, as that gives you the option to get read-write access to this 'ROM'.Only on a few devices with unusual partition schemes does that not work.

Since they acquired them it seems they have dumped no money into improvements. While it is an office editing App, it really needs some work to be "great." Granted, it is much more functional than Microsofts Office 365 backed App.

I'm not calling you out here, but I'm interested in your post. Firstly the Skydrive app (although it seems it isn't very good) has been available for Symbian since long before there was any talk of a buyout. Secondly, MS have NOT yet bought Nokia, they have cleared some of the hurdles but there's still a long way to go and at the moment they have to be seen to be independent, now more than ever (hence Nokia's Surface RT killer) Please provide citations.

Let's get real. An office-ish app on a smart phone is NOT a challenge to a full blown desktop office suite. To suggest that it is indicates an absolute lack of understanding of the user base and use cases for office suites.

Came here to say this. I have a bluetooth iGo Stowaway originally intended for BlackBerry [amazon.com] but it works great with my Android device. The screen on my Razr Maxx HD is pretty decent; I generally don't feel the need for a screen, although I generally carry an HDMI cable so I can Netflix in the Hotel.

PS: My TV stick uses something like 3% of the power of my previous, PC-based solution. The PC would wheeze with fans because of the load of Netflix, the new solution (the size of a thumb drive) is too small to have a fan and doesn't need it.

The point is that if editing documents on the phone is important to you, you'd buy a device that did have a way to output video to a larger screen. (My Android phone can do that, although I have no use for the feature and have never tried it... I bought it because it was cheap--LG Nexus 4)

Let's get real. An office-ish app on a smart phone is NOT a challenge to a full blown desktop office suite. To suggest that it is indicates an absolute lack of understanding of the user base and use cases for office suites.

Its not just a challenge its a threat to 60% of Microsofts Profits. Right now Android passed 1 Billion activations in September(windows is about 1.2Billion), while Microsoft thinks delaying its suite to get people to buy their OS. If you don't think its a treaty then you do not understand how people use Office.

I'm pretty sure the GP does understand how people use Office, which is why he doesn't think a smartphone app is in any way a challenge to a desktop office suite.

Quite honestly, the only value I've ever seen in smartphone and tablet office apps is viewing content or making absolutely minor modifications. And quite honestly, I'd say even that is a minority concern, most people lose interest the moment they install a "free office suite" and find out, in practice, how much of a PITA the touch UI is for creat

Right. If anything, having an MSOffice-compatible app on Android phones just deepens the entrenchment of MSOffice, ratifying it's document formats as the one and only standard. Not saying they're not already enough of a standard that it's not important to be able to work with them - just that this isn't a challenge to Office. More of a challenge to using Office as a competitive advantage for Windows phone.

All this does is check the box of being able to open and make small edits to MSO documents on your p

I agree, but consider also how impossible it now becomes for MS to make money from Office on portable devices. Sure, it isn't (yet) very relevant to sales on PCs and full notebooks, but that's not exactly the growth segment in the computer market. And when you consider that the typical young person has an Android phone before they ever get a PC. When they get around to buying one, you can sort of imagine that a future, better version of Quickoffice on the PC might feel to them like the document editor to tr

Except Apple and Microsoft offered Google to join into their conglomerate, but Google declined and wanted to snatch the patents away without Apple and Microsoft.

Problem is, that wouldn't have helped them, because Apple & MS could still go after the manufacturers of Android devices, and Google could do nothing to stop it. Without hardware manufacturers Android doesn't exist, so they had to have their own to use as a defensive shield for their manufacturers.

The copy I bought a few months ago wasn't connected to Google Drive, so I'm pretty sure it does its own processing and rendering. It is usable, and good in a pinch, but no replacement for a full office suite. But what do It need a full office suite on a Nexus 7 for anyways?

That's sometimes blurry though. For older mobile phone operating systems, I wasn't the customer of the software vendor, but the hardware vendor that sold me the phone was. It's not obvious to someone buying an Android phone that the manufacturer is not the customer of the OS vendor, and therefore that they are not indirectly the customer. After all, they're handing over money for the device, they'd expect to be the customer.

Considering that you can get all of this for free from multiple sources for multiple platforms, the $99/year looks like a ripoff.Some years ago Bill Gates, in a moment of wishful thinking, said that hardware was trending towards free while software was where the real money could be made.At the time I didn't believe it and today we have a situation where most software is free (and hardware is cheap). This kind of undercuts Microsoft's business model.I can't remember the last time I bought any software. Every

SMS was expensive in the beginning because it used a part of the messaging protocol that was not really intended for high volume, and the telcos hadn't configured things to support it. But it beat hell out of the old text paging services.

Once the telcos figured out the demand and started configuring the hardware and software to facilitate it, the price dropped. Almost everyone just bundles unlimited messaging into their phone plan these days, don't they?

In many markets Google has a near monopoly position. Their global smart phone market share is around 80% and in some markets it's even higher. Bundling an office suite in order to leverage their dominant operating system is unlikely to sit well with regulators.

The mere bundling of Internet Explorer and latterly Windows Media Player with Windows was enough to be classed as anti trust, because MS were deemed to be trying to use a monopoly position in one market to secure a monopoly position in another market.

In this case, Google could quite easily be seen to be trying to use a dominant position in the smartphone market to extend their dominance into the mobile office app market.

Um. No it was not. MS did not get in trouble merely by bundling IE with Windows. They got in trouble for threatening partners and OEMs not to do business with competitors like Netscape and Java. For example, OEMs could lose licensing rights to Windows if they installed Netscape. MS hinted to Intel that they would give preferences to AMD in the next version of Windows if Intel released an optimized JVM for Java.

Not necessarily. It really depends on how they do the integration. If they set the application default behavior to always open docs with QuickOffice, then maybe. But if they leave it as an option and you have to manually select to always use QuickOffice then I would venture to guess there's virtually no chance a suit would be filed and even less of a chance of it being successful if someone does.

In many markets Google has a near monopoly position. Their global smart phone market share is around 80% and in some markets it's even higher. Bundling an office suite in order to leverage their dominant operating system is unlikely to sit well with regulators.

I sure you were against the inclusion of Microsoft Office crapware with every version of its OS. I personally welcome the EU including a start screen on Desktops. Ignoring that Apple has started to bundle iwork...and Microsoft has started including crippled office with its tablets.. neither of these is available for Android. The reality is though Microsoft Office is the monopoly on Microsofts formats something they secured through buying votes in ISO. This will help stop the current compatibility tax myth.

Even a quick and basic search of Google Play apps reveals there to be quite a number of competing products in the market. MS doesn't have one, so it clearly wouldn't have a case. The makers of Kingsoft Office and Officesuite 7 may well have a case.

Quickoffice? How is ths news? Not long back they made it free, and we even got free extra Google Drive space for downloading and installing it. And it doesn't need to be KitKat, it works with earlier versions as well.

Android has been a huge success, I read that it has something like 80% of the market share of mobile devices, but that statistic was probably made up.

When Grandma opens an email on her tablet thing that her IT grandson told her to get so that he could stop supporting her Windows computer, she's going to be opening the word attachment using Google software - and then possibly editing

Is the need for such emotive language when talking about Google. Personally I welcome the new competition in the Office field if only Microsoft hadn't abusively corrupted ISO it would be as exciting as browsers are today.

I needed to view a Word document in a hurry. I got a copy of QuickOffice from Amazon when it was a free app-of-the-day last year, but opted to try Google's more recent flavor. Google insisted I logged in, and refused to do anything if I just wanted to use a Word document on my SD card. There was NO reason for this. I, for one, disapprove of this change, regardless of any of the others.

It's been considered a fairly useful capability since it was on Symbian...how long ago was it on that platform?? Too long ago to remember. This is nothing new apart from it's Google and Android, and perhaps the pervasiveness of the platform.

I for one, welcome our new extending embracing and extinguishing Overlords.

Google would have to adopt Open Document Format and extend the specification from a monopoly position!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish [wikipedia.org] . I don't thing you understand. The worst part of this is we don't have a standard we have the mess of OOXML after Microsoft polluted the integrity of of ISO to its incredible shame. To protect 60% of its profits from its Office compatibility scam. This in someway goes to expose this scam.